As the global economy continues to expand, so does the need to be able to effectively communicate over distances. One area of communication that has seen steady growth and increased customer confidence is the use of telepresence. Telepresence has become an important and effective way of communication between individuals and groups over short and long distances. Telepresence creates an environment where a participant's meeting experience is similar to a real world meeting. In a telepresence environment, locations over short and long distances are connected via high speed video bandwidth communications links, and an appropriate conferencing bridge. The key requirements of a telepresence experience are appearance as real size life like images, good eye contact between the viewer and the speaker, and stereo spatial audio of the speaker along with excellent video quality.
However, while prior telepresence systems have provided improvements over audio/video conferencing systems, bulk of the requirements of telepresence are limited to a two location meeting only. The disparity between in-person conferences and the telepresence systems for the multiple locations meetings remains substantial. Conventionally, in a telepresence meeting involving multiple participants across multiple locations, each location was able to see the active speaker location in real-size life like mode, while other participant locations were not visible. As and when different participant locations became active by starting to speak, those locations were made visible to other participant locations. The switching from one active participant location to another is generally voice based in that a participant location was required to speak continuously for a few seconds before it was moved to the screens of the other participant locations. Such systems result in a huge disconnect between all participants as participants are only able to see the speaking location resulting in huge degradation of the meeting experience in comparison to a face to face meeting for everyone.
Some other telepresence systems allow all participant locations to simultaneously see all other participant locations on their screens. This is achieved by splitting the available screen(s) space equally amongst the other participant locations, and all participants from each location are displayed on the allocated screen space. However, by splitting the available screen space to accommodate all participant locations, the telepresence experience is completely compromised because participants do not appear real size and life like. There is no eye contact and also there is no stereo spatial audio of the speaker. On account of this users are required to continuously scan the display screens, examining each user individually, to determine the person speaking. This is especially very difficult in a situation in which the screen is divided among several participant locations, and each location has multiple users within the camera's field of vision.